Tesfaye Mersha
Associate Professor
Department of Pediatrics
Dr. Tesfaye Mersha is currently an associate professor at the University of Cincinnati in the Department of Pediatrics. Dr. Mersha has received a Faculty Research Achievement Award from Cincinnati Children’s, the African Professionals Network (APNET) Business and Professional Achievement Award, a Keystone Symposia Early Career Investigator Award. His career in genetics and research began with an interest in understanding the interplay between biology and the environmental conditions that contribute to disease. Over time, he has broadened his research interests to include genomics, genetic ancestry, racial disparities, personalized medicine and bioinformatics.
One of his areas of expertise is multi-omics (genomics, epigenomics, transcriptomics, microbiome, proteomics and metabolomics). He has worked to integrate multi-omics with statistical genetics and bioinformatics methods to uncover the molecular architecture of medical conditions, such as asthma and asthma-related allergic diseases.
The Mersha Lab performs a variety of computational and applied data analysis projects, including the development of statistical and genome informatics tools that enable multiethnic admixture, genome-wide association and omics integration studies of biomedical traits. Their goal is to develop an in-depth understanding of the intricate interactions between genomic variations and environmental exposure in the etiology of complex diseases — and then translate these findings into clinical practice through collaborations with clinicians.
Dr. Mersha and colleagues have made several significant contributions to the field of genetic research. For example, in 2018, they filed a patent for their invention, “Methods for Diagnosing and Managing Treatment of Atopic Dermatitis.” Additionally, their web-based bioinformatics tool called AncestrySNPminer was the first of its kind; it retrieves ancestry-informative markers (AIMs) with divergent allele frequency/selection pressure from genomic databases. Other novel bioinformatics tools they've developed include GENEASE, SAGE, AdmixPower, MI-MAAP, PAMAM and AllergyGenDB. Their work has been published in many peer-reviewed medical journals, including The Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology, Scientific Report (Nature research journal), Genetics (Genetics Society of America), Frontiers in Immunology, PLOS ONE, Bioinformatics, Frontiers in Genetics and BMC Genomics. Dr. Mersha's article, "Genome-wide Analysis Revealed Sex-Specific Gene Expression in Asthmatics", was published by Human Molecular Genetics on August 1, 2019.